War & Peace Quote by Stjepan Mesic

Mesic’s line is doing something blunt and politically surgical: it relocates agency from “ancient ethnic hatreds” to a chain of command. By framing the Yugoslav People’s Army as an instrument that “did what Milosevic’s regime asked,” he strips the army of its favorite alibi - neutrality, professionalism, order-keeping - and recasts it as a policy implementer for an expansionist project. The phrase “asked of it” is almost chilling in its understatement; it makes mass coercion sound like a bureaucratic request, which is exactly the point. Violence, Mesic implies, wasn’t a breakdown of governance but governance itself.

“Greater Serbia” functions as a loaded shorthand with two audiences in mind. For outsiders, it’s an easily legible label for the territorial logic behind the wars of the 1990s: borders redrawn by force, demographics “corrected,” legality manufactured after the fact. For insiders, it’s a dare to name what was often disguised as the protection of Serb minorities or the defense of Yugoslavia. Mesic collapses those rhetorical screens into a single, accusatory thesis: the federal army became the regime’s muscle.

The context matters because Mesic isn’t a distant commentator; he’s a former member of Yugoslavia’s collective presidency who later led Croatia. That biography gives the sentence its edge and its agenda. He’s arguing for responsibility, not tragedy; for intent, not chaos. It’s also a pre-emptive strike against revisionism: if the army was executing a regime’s vision, then the story is not “civil war” as misfortune, but state power pursuing a nationalist blueprint.